Any serious Kingmaker fans out there? The old Avalon Hill boardgame, I mean.

Surely, there's some way the rules can be fixed to make the game more playable?

RPGPundit

I've got the game and I've played it a few times. The rules could be a little clearer in places. What do you think needs fixing?

I'll have to dig it back up soon as I haven't played in years.  I think teh main problem was the tendency towards stalemate. I guess something to reward agressiveness would help.  
 
Imperium Romanum had morale, which had a direct impact on combat effectiveness.  For Kingmaker, the most important piece is that morale went down a bit each turn that you didn't make some kind of attack - the troops got bored sitting around.  Even if players take out empty castles of the opponent, at leat they are doing something that makes them move around and expose their leaders to danger.
 
One thign that I've seen experienced players do is not dole out positions until the moment of combat. This not only adds uncertaintly but also protects characters from some random events.  It might be better to have only troops be playable immediately before a battle, not titles.

In answer to the basic question of what's wrong, its the endgame: inevitably a game of kingmaker turns into all sides piling all of their nobles in one big heap, with all advantage going to whoever holds out (meaning its disadvantageous to attack), and waiting it out in cities until the right plagues hit to kill off enough nobles or heirs for one player to end up the winner.

And sometimes this endgame drags on for hours and hours.

RPGPundit

That's an old complaint. I've seen it addressed in several places.

One example: http://grognard.com/variants/kingmakr.txt

BGG is another place to look. Here are a couple threads:
Does this game ever end?
I wanted to like this game more than I do.

Also Usenet: Kingmaker, Samurai help?

Notable points are:

• Don't just use the Basic game, some of the optional/advanced rules will fix the stalemate problem.
• Get your hands on the Variant event cards, and especially use the Refuge rule included with them.
• Use writs to force people to attend Parliament, and "make them an offer they can't refuse" by lending them a ship if necessary.
• Reshuffle the event cards after each Embassy.

Basically when I played the game, the biggest problem was Gamer ADD. Folks just wanted to play the Basic Game, they played it once, then they went on to something else (probably a crappy rail game or Civ).

Anyway, to sum up, here are the rules used in the World Boardgaming Championship. You can bet they've been fine-tuned to produce a game that can be finished in a decent amount of time: http://www.boardgamers.org/yearbkex/kgmpge.htm

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;373419That's an old complaint. I've seen it addressed in several places.

One example: http://grognard.com/variants/kingmakr.txt

BGG is another place to look. Here are a couple threads:
Does this game ever end?
I wanted to like this game more than I do.

Also Usenet: Kingmaker, Samurai help?

Notable points are:

• Don't just use the Basic game, some of the optional/advanced rules will fix the stalemate problem.
• Get your hands on the Variant event cards, and especially use the Refuge rule included with them.
• Use writs to force people to attend Parliament, and "make them an offer they can't refuse" by lending them a ship if necessary.
• Reshuffle the event cards after each Embassy.

Basically when I played the game, the biggest problem was Gamer ADD. Folks just wanted to play the Basic Game, they played it once, then they went on to something else (probably a crappy rail game or Civ).

Anyway, to sum up, here are the rules used in the World Boardgaming Championship. You can bet they've been fine-tuned to produce a game that can be finished in a decent amount of time: http://www.boardgamers.org/yearbkex/kgmpge.htm

I will have to take another look at the advanced rules, actually, I don't think I've ever necessarily used them in entirety; given that I seem to recall some of them were pretty convoluted.

I don't think that its an acceptable solution for me to have to add new cards; since I'm not the "arts and crafts" type, and trolling around for long-out-of-print magazines is not really a credible option.

RPGPundit

Yes, I agree the advanced rules (and the rulebook as a whole) aren't a paragon of clarity. There is a rulebook document on BGG that claims to be cleaned up, though I can't vouch for it personally.

Also agree that it's less than ideal to have to add variant cards. OTOH they aren't hard to come by judging from the BGG sell/trade/ebay information.

But I'd say the use of writs plus reshuffling after each Embassy will go a long way to keeping people from holing up indefinitely. Perhaps in lieu of the Variant deck, you could randomize that stuff by other means. Here are my thoughts on that.

Key items listed at the WBC page can be broken down into several types of events. Numbers in parentheses are the # of cards in the Variant deck.

Gales at Sea (2)
Treachery* (3)
Vacillating Allegiance*† (10)
Catastrophe (3)
Royal Death (1)
Refuge** (6)

The events with a * only affect the drawing player when drawn during the Event phase. The event marked with a ** is a "save and use later" card. The card marked with a † has a special effect if drawn during a combat resolution. But the Refuge card seems to be "pocketable" if drawn during combat resolution, like a Free Move card.

So to begin with let's note that there are 90 Event Cards in the original game. If you actually had the Variant cards and used all of them as recommended by WBC that would add 25 cards. So although you'd lose the "card counting" effect, you could achieve a similar frequency by using dice thus:

Every time an Event Card is to be drawn in the game, roll two dice. On a 7 or 12, instead of drawing an Event Card, roll again on the following table. (I know, this gives a slightly lower frequency of generating a Variant Event than having the cards would. But it's easy to remember, and I think the reduced frequency makes up somewhat for the increased probability of getting the same Variant Event twice in a row.)

Roll 3d6 and use one of the following tables

3-4 Vacillating Allegiance 86/87
5-6 Gales at Sea 16/16
7-8 Vacillating Allegiance
9-10 Refuge 52/52
11 Treachery 26/27
12 Catastrophe 26/25
13-15 Vacillating Allegiance
16-17 Royal Death 9/9
18 Vacillating Allegiance


3-6 Gales at Sea 16/20
7-10 Vacillating Allegiance 86/88
11-12 Refuge 52/52
13 Treachery 26/21
14-15 Catastrophe 26/25
16-18 Royal Death 9/10

Explanation of the tables: the numbers after each event show the ideal frequency (out of 216, rounded normally) before the slash. The number after the slash shows the actual frequency produced by the table. As you can see, the first table is very close to ideal. The second table is more compact but it overstates Gales at Sea while understating Treachery. Use that one in your game if you want to make long sea travel dangerous.

If the table is used during the Event phase, then the result takes effect and no additional Event Card is drawn. If the table is used during the Combat phase, then only the Vacillating Allegiance and Refuge results have an effect. In any case, an actual Event Card will then be drawn to resolve the combat.

When a Refuge result is thrown during the Event phase, the player gets a token indicating a Refuge "in hand". Six tokens should be made up and if all six are currently held, then a Refuge result should be re-rolled. (This best preserves the frequencies in the tournament rules, but it shouldn't matter much if, instead, you treat a Refuge result as "no effect".)

Note: in case the WBC page isn't clear, the full original rules for the Variant cards can be found in the first part of this PDF: http://www.ahgeneral.org/gameparts/Variant_Rules.pdf

Also for images of the actual variant cards, this link will help: http://www.thewargamer.com/Games.html. I used this to get the frequencies of the cards in the 25-card set, in lieu of digging out my copy.

Kingmaker is one of my all-time favorite games, but I haven't played it in about 20 years since my wife isn't "into" that kind of game. (She's only into RPGs.)

I agree that the rules need to be tightened up a bit. We always seemed to have games "end" in rules litigation rather than by having an actual victor.....